Thanks to Maud Newton, I discovered an antidote to all the wide-eyed BEA coverage (in which I’ve admittedly played my part) in blog posts by Jennifer Nix, “a recovering staff ‘writer'” for Variety who came to the show as an indie publisher of “instant political books” like George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant and recent Amazon chart-topper Glenn Greenwald’s How Would a Patriot Act? Slamming the whole weekend as a chance for “corporate newspaper and magazine reporters [to] wander through thousands of booths, like so many rock stars, saying and writing glowing items about their corporate-publisher-siblings’ books,” Nix eventually found herself confronting D.C.’s book media at one panel I’m surely sorry I missed.
Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik discusses “the quest for crossover books,” the ongoing search for a book with academic rigor that’s still got a lively enough voice to interest readers who haven’t worked on a doctoral dissertation of their own at some point in their lives. And what he finds is that many university presses are thinking with their stomachs, including an Illinois book about turkey, a Duke book about French bread, and three Cal volumes on wine. (And he didn’t even spot the revised edition of The Oxford Companion to Food coming out this October…)